It may be time to sell your coastal property.

This follows with a graphic of Florida.

This implies that people in Southern Florida should take in account a 6 metre (236 inch) rise in sea levels as a result of President Trump’s decision. Does this implied claim stack up. As in the previous post, let us take a look at Climate Interactive’s data.

Without policy, Climate Interactive forecast that US emissions without policy will be 14.44 GtCO2e, just over 10% of global GHG emissions, and up from 6.8 GtCO2e in 2010. At most, even on CIs flawed reasoning, global emissions will be just 7% lower in 2100 with US policy. In the real world, the expensive job-destroying policy of the US will make global emissions around 1% lower even under the implausible assumption that the country were to extend the policy through to the end of the century. That would be a tiny fraction of one degree lower, even making a further assumption that a doubling of CO2 levels causes 3C of warming (an assumption contradicted by recent evidence). Now it could be that every other country will follow suit, and abandon all climate mitigation policies. This would be a unlikely scenario, given that I have not sensed a great enthusiasm for other countries to follow the lead of the current Leader of the Free World. But even if that did happen, the previous post showed that current policies do not amount to very much difference in emissions. Yet let us engage on a flight of fancy and assume for the moment that President Trump abandoning the Paris Climate Agreement will (a) make the difference between 1.5C of warming, with negligable sea-level rise and 4.2C of warming with the full impact of sea-level rise being felt (b) 5% of that rise. What difference will this make to sea-level rise?

The Miami-Dade Climate Change website has a report from The Sea Level Rise Task Force that I examined last November. Figure 1 of that report gives projections of sea-level rise assuming the no global climate policy.

Taking the most extreme NOAA projection it will be around the end of next century before sea-levels rose by 6 metres. Under the IPCC AR5 median estimates – and this is meant to be the Climate Bible for policy-makers – it would be hundreds of years before that sea-level rise would be achieved. Let us assume that the time horizon of any adult thinking of buying a property, is through to 2060, 42 years from now. The NOAA projection is 30 inches (0.76 metres) for the full difference in sea-level rise, or 1.5 inches (0.04 metres) for the slightly more realistic estimate. Using the mainstream IPCC AR5 median estimate, sea-level rise is 11 inches (0.28 metres) for the full difference in sea-level rise, or 0.6 inches (0.01 metres) for the slightly more realistic estimate. The real world evidence suggests that even these tiny projected sea level rises are exaggerated. Sea tide gauges around Florida have failed to show an acceleration in the rate of sea level rise. For example this from NOAA for Key West.

2.37mm/year is 9 inches a century. Even this might be an exaggeration, as in Miami itself, where the recorded increase is 2.45mm/year, the land is estimated to be sinking at 0.53mm/year.

Concluding Comments

If people based their evidence on the real world, President Trump pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement will make somewhere between zero and an imperceptible difference to sea-level rise. If they base their assumptions on mainstream climate models, the difference is still imperceptible. But those with the biggest influence on policy are more influenced by the crazy alarmists like Joe Romm. The real worry should be that many policy-makers State level will be encouraged to waste even more money on unnecessary flood defenses, and could effectively make low-lying properties near worthless by planning blight when there is no real risk.

Joe Romm promotes a myth that the Paris Climate Agreement will make a huge difference to future greenhouse gas emissions. Below I show how the modelled impact of think tank Climate Interactive conclusion of a large difference is based on emissions forecasts of implausible large emissions growth in policy countries, and low emissions growth in the non-policy developing countries.

In the previous post I looked at how blogger Joe Romm falsely rebutted a claim that President Donald Trump had made that the Paris climate deal would only reduce only reduce future warming in 2100 by a mere 0.2°C. Romm was wrong on two fronts. He first did not check the data behind his assertions and second, in comparing two papers by the same organisation he did not actually read the explanation in the later paper on how it differed from the first. In this post I look at how he has swallowed whole the fiction of bogus forecasts, that means the mere act of world leaders signing a bit of paper leads to huge changes in forecast emissions.

In a speech from the White House Rose Garden filled with thorny lies and misleading statements, one pricks the most: Trump claimed that the Paris climate deal would only reduce future warming in 2100 by a mere 0.2°C. White House talking points further assert that “according to researchers at MIT, if all member nations met their obligations, the impact on the climate would be negligible… less than .2 degrees Celsius in 2100.”

The Director of MIT’s System Dynamics Group, John Sterman, and his partner at Climate Interactive, Andrew Jones, quickly emailed ThinkProgress to explain, “We are not these researchers and this is not our finding.”

They point out that “our business as usual, reference scenario leads to expected warming by 2100 of 4.2°C. Full implementation of current Paris pledges plus all announced mid-century strategies would reduce expected warming by 2100 to 3.3°C, a difference of 0.9°C [1.6°F].”

The reference scenario is RCP8.5, used in the IPCC AR5 report published in 2013 and 2014. This is essentially a baseline non-policy forecast against which the impact of climate mitigation policies can be judged. The actual RCP website produces emissions estimates by type of greenhouse gas, of which breaks around three-quarters is CO2. The IPCC and Climate Interactive add these different gases together with an estimate of global emissions in 2100. Climate Interactive current estimate as of April 2017 is 137.58 GtCO2e for the the reference scenario and the National Plans will produce 85.66 GTCO2e. These National would allegedly make global emissions 37.7% than they would have been without them, assuming they are extended beyond 2030. Climate Interactive have summarized this in a graph.

To anyone who actually reads the things, this does not make sense. The submissions made prior to the December 2015 COP21 in Paris were mostly political exercises, with very little of real substance from all but a very few countries, such as the United Kingdom. Why it does not make sense becomes clear from the earlier data that I extracted from Climate Interactives’ C-ROADS Climate Simulator version v4.026v.071 around November 2015. This put the RCP8.5 global GHG emissions estimate in 2100 at the equivalent of 139.3 GtCO2e. But policy is decided and implemented at country level. To determine the impact of policy proposal there must be some sort of breakdown of emissions. C-ROADS does not provide a breakdown by all countries, but does to divide the world into up to 15 countries and regions. One derived break-down is into 7 countries or regions. That is the countries of USA, Russia, China and India, along with the country groups of EU27, Other Developed Countries and Other Developing Countries. Also available are population and GDP historical data and forecasts. Using this RCP8.5 and built-in population forecasts I derived the following GHG emissions per capita for the historical period 1970 to 2012 and the forecast period 2013 to 2100.

Like when I looked at Climate Interactives’ per capita CO2 emissions from fossil fuels estimates at the end of 2015, these forecasts did not make much sense. Given that these emissions are the vast majority of total GHG emissions it is not surprising that the same picture emerges.

In the USA and the EU I can think of no apparent reason for the forecast of per capita emissions to rise when they have been falling since 1973 and 1980 respectively. It would require for energy prices to keep falling, and for all sectors to be needlessly wasteful. The same goes for other developed countries, which along with Canada and Australia, includes the lesser developed countries of Turkey and Mexico. Indeed why would these countries go from per capita emissions similar to the EU27 now to those of the USA in 2100?

In Russia, emissions have risen since the economy bottomed out in the late 1990s following the collapse of communism. It might end up with higher emissions than the USA in 1973 due to the much harsher and extreme climate. But technology has vastly improved in the last half century and it should be the default assumption that it will continue to improve through the century. It looks like someone, or a number of people, have failed to reconcile the country estimate with the forecast decline in population from 143 million in 2010 to 117 million. But more than this, there is something seriously wrong with emission estimates that would imply that the Russian people become evermore inefficient and wasteful in their energy use.

In China there are similar issues. Emissions have increased massively in the last few decades on the back of even more phenomenal growth, that surpasses the growth of any large economy in history. But emissions per capita will likely peak due to economic reasons in the next couple of decades, and probably at a much lower level than the USA in 1973. But like Russia, population is also forecast to be much lower than currently. From a population of 1340 million in 2010, Climate Interactive forecasts population to peak at 1420 million in 2030 (from 2020 to 2030 growth slows to 2 million a year) to 1000 million in 2100. From 2080 (forecast population 1120) to 2100 population is forecast to decline by 6 million a year.

The emissions per capita for India I would suggest are far too low. When made, the high levels of economic growth were predicted to collapse post 2012. When I wrote the previous post on 30th December 2015, to meet the growth forecast for 2010-2015, India’s GDP would have needed to drop by 20% in the next 24 hours. It did not happen, and in the 18 months since actual growth has further widened the gap with forecast. Similarly forecast growth in GHG emissions are far too low. The impact of 1.25 billion people today (and 1.66 billion in 2100) is made largely irrelevant, nicely side-lining a country who has declared economic growth is a priority.

As with the emissions forecast for India, the emissions forecast for other developing countries is far too pessimistic, based again on too pessimistic growth forecasts. This mixed group of countries include the 50+ African nations, plus nearly all of South America. Other countries in the group include Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, Haiti, Trinidad, Iraq, Iran and Kiribati. There are at least a score more I have omitted, in total making up around 42% of the current global population and 62% of the forecast population in 2100. That is 3 billion people today against 7 billion in 2100. A graph summarizing of Climate Interactive’s population figures is below.

This can be compared with total GHG emissions.

For the USA, the EU27, the other Developed countries and China, I have made more reasonable emissions per capita estimates for 2100.

These more reasonable estimates (assuming there is no technological breakthrough that makes zero carbon energy much cheaper than any carbon technology) produce a reduction in projected emissions of the same order of magnitude as the supposed reduction resulting from implementation of the National Plans. However, global emissions will not be this level, as non-policy developing nations are likely to have much higher emissions. Adjusting for this gives my rough estimate for global emissions in 2100.

The overall emissions forecast is not very dissimilar to that of RCP8.5. Only this time the emissions growth has shift dramatically from the policy countries to the non-policy countries. This is consistent with the data from 1990 to 2012, where I found that the net emissions growth was accounted for by the increase in emissions from developing countries who were not signatories to reducing emissions under the 1992 Rio Declaration. As a final chart I have put the revised emission estimates for India and Other Developing Countries to scale alongside Climate Interactives’ Scoreboard graphic at the top of the page.

This clearly shows that the emissions pathway consistent the constraining warming to 2°C will only be attained if the developing world collectively start reducing their emissions in a very few years from now. In reality, the priority of many is continued economic growth, which will see emissions rise for decades.

Concluding Comments

This is a long post, covering a lot of ground. In summary though it shows environmental activist has Joe Romm has failed to check the claims he is promoting. An examination of Climate Interactive (CI) data underlying the claims that current policies will reduce global temperature by 0.9°C through reducing GHG global emissions does not stand up to scrutiny. That 0.9°C claim is based on global emissions being around 35-40% lower than they would have been without policy. Breaking the CI data down into 7 countries and regions reveals that

the emissions per capita forecasts for China and Russia show implausibly high levels of emissions growth, when they show peak in a few years.

the emissions per capita forecasts for USA and EU27 show emissions increasing after being static or falling for a number of decades.

the emissions per capita forecasts for India and Other Developing Countries show emissions increasing as at implausibly lower rates than in recent decades.

The consequence is that by the mere act of signing an agreement makes apparent huge differences to projected future emissions. In reality it is folks playing around with numbers and not achieving anything at all, except higher energy prices and job-destroying regulations. However, it does save the believers in the climate cult from having to recognize the real world. Given the massed hordes of academics and political activists, that is a very big deal indeed.

Senator Bernie Saunders of Vermont was for a while running a close second to Hillary Clinton in the Democrat Primaries. Had his extreme left views, advanced years and the fact that he is the junior Senator from the 49th most populous State, he might have stood a chance against a former First Lady and Secretary of State. But Senator Sanders’ recent questioning of Scott Pruitt shows why he is unfit for high office. Ron Clutz has transcribed more of the dialog, by I think two statements encapsulate this.

At 0.45

As you may know, some 97% of scientists who have written articles for peer-reviewed journals have concluded that climate change is real, it is caused by human activity, and it is already causing devastating problems in the US and around the world. Do you believe that climate change is caused by carbon emissions from human activity?

There is no 97% survey of scientists which conclude these things. As Ron Clutz observes the nearest to definite questions was Examining the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change – Doran and Zimmerman 2009, where the second question was

2. Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?

One could answer “yes” if you thought that 10% of the rise in the was due to land use changes, and the rest due to natural factors. It does not ask about fossil fuel emissions, and the question allows for belief in other factors other than human activity whether known or unknown. Neither does it ask if temperature rise is net harmful, with huge devastating impacts already evident.

There is also the Cook et. al survey of peer-reviewed academic papers that I looked after listening to a lecture Cook gave at Bristol University in late 2014. The survey just looked to the assumption that humans cause some warming, whether explicit or implied. Like the Doran and Zimmerman survey it is just hearsay. This Sen. Sanders presents as good evidence that there is already a clear catastrophic problem caused by changes in the climate. If there is real and overwhelming evidence, why does Sen. Sanders not refer to that instead of misrepresenting bogus opinion polls?

Senator Sanders then goes even further. At 1.50

While you are not certain, the vast majority of scientists are telling us that if we do not get our act together and transform out energy system away from fossil fuel there is a real question as to the quality of the planet that we are going to be leaving our children and our grandchildren. So you are applying for a job as Administrator at the EPH to protect our environment. Overwhelming majority of scientists say we have to act boldly and your’re telling me that there needs to be more debate on this issue and that we should not be acting boldly.

Sanders now says a majority of scientists are telling us we must change our energy systems. Aside from the fact that only a very small minority of scientists have any sort of competency in the field of climate, (and there is evidence a lot of demonstrated incompetency within the small group e.g. here), they have no expertise in the economic or moral cases for policy. For policy the interpretation of the moral imperatives and the practical possibilities should be the realm of politicians. For those who sit on specialist committees, they should at least have their own developed views on the field.

Senator Bernie Saunders has taken some very dodgy opinion polls, grossly exaggerated the findings, and then ascribed statements to the climatologists that are far removed, and way beyond, any competencies they might have. As I see it, the role of President of the United States, as a leader, is to critically interpret what they are given in order to make decisions for the nation. That is the exact opposite of what Sanders did last week.

Summary

Friends of the Earth have a webpage claiming to be “fracking facts”. The key points I make are.

The claims of dangers of fracking raise questions, that need to be answered before they can be considered credible.

The claim that fracking could affect house prices is totally unsupported.

The claim that shale gas will not significantly affect energy prices is based on out of date data. The British Geological Survey has shown that the potential of shale gas is huge. Friends of the Earth has played a major role in preventing that potential being realized.

FoE has consequently helped prevent shale gas from relieving the energy crisis brought upon by the Climate Change Act 2008.

Claims that pursuing shale gas in Britain will affect global emissions are pure fantasy. Also is a fantasy the belief that Britain is leading the way on emissions reductions. We ain’t leading if collectively the world is not following. The evidence shows clearly shows this.

In the previous post I looked at how FoE blatantly mislead about an agreement they reached with the Advertising Standards Authority, which caused the unusual step of ASA Chief Executive Guy Parker issuing a strongly worded statement to defend the ASA’s integrity.

If leaks are a problem, with respect to fracking in the UK has this been risk assessed, with appropriate measures taken to prevent leaks?

Does that statistic of 6% allow for when there is natural leakage in the area of fracking leaking in the water supplies are venting into the atmosphere in the area where fracking is occurring? This was the case in the images of the flaming water faucet in the movie Gasland.

Have there been steps taken in the USA to reduce genuine leaks?

Has the proportion of wells leaking gas in the USA been increasing or decreasing?

Has the average amount of gas leaked been increasing or decreasing?

How when extracting gas from well below water aquifers, through a lined tube, that is both water-tight and gas-tight, is that gas (and fracking fluids) meant to leech into the water supply?

Then there is the statement without evidence.

Fracking could also affect house prices.

This was one of the issues FoE in its agreement with the ASA have the assurance not to repeat claims that fracking affects property prices, unless the evidence changes. Legally there might be cop-out where that assurance does not apply to claims made on its website. Literally, the statement is not untrue, just as the claim that a butterfly flapping its wings on the North Downs could lead to a typhoon in the South China Sea.

Claims that fracking would create a lot of jobs have also been overstated. According to Cuadrilla, each of its proposed 6-year projects in Lancashire that were recently rejected by the council would only have created 11 jobs.

The claim about Cuadrilla is sourced from an Independent article in June 2013.

“We’ve done an analysis and it’s a very small…at the most it’s a very small percentage…basically insignificant,” said Mark Linder, a public relations executive at Bell Pottinger who is also responsible for Cuadrilla’s corporate development.

The article later says

“According to Poyry, Lancashire shale gas production could also reduce the country’s wholesale gas and electricity prices by as much as 4 per cent between 2014 and 2035, which corresponds to an average saving of £810m/year,”

It is not surprising that shale gas developments in Lancashire alone will not have a significant impact on UK energy prices, especially if that is restricted to a few sites by one company. But over three years later the landscape has changed. The British Geological Survey has been publishing estimates of the quantities of shale gas (and oil) that exists beneath the ground.

The figures are at first hard to comprehend. They are large numbers in units of measure that ordinary people (even people with some knowledge of the field) find hard to comprehend, let alone put into some perspective. In my view, the figures need to be related to annual British consumption. Page 8 of the DECC UK Energy Statistics, 2015 & Q4 2015 estimates gas demand at 794 TWh in 2015.

The BGS uses tcf (tera cubic feet) for its’ estimates, which (like a domestic gas bill) can be converted from TWh. The 794 TWh is about 2.7 tcf. Not all shale gas is recoverable. In fact possibly only 10% of reserves is recoverable on existing technology, and depending on the quality of the deposits.

There are also shale oil deposits, measured by the BGS in both barrels and millions of tonnes. Refinery production (a rough estimate of consumption) was 63 million tonnes in 2015. I will again assume 10% recovery, which may be overly prudent.

The biggest shock was published just a few weeks after the Independent article on 27th July 2013. The size of the Bowland shale was truly staggering. The central estimate is 1329 tcf, meaning enough to satisfy 49 years of current UK gas demand. Potentially it is more, due to the depth of deposits in many areas. No significant deposits of oil are thought to be present

On 23rd May 2014 BGS published the results for the Weald Basin, a large area in the South East of England. Whilst there were no significant deposits of gas, the central estimate of 591 million tonnes is enough to supply the UK for one year.

On 25 June 2014 the Welsh Government published the estimates for Wales. The main gas deposits are thought to be in Wrexham/Cheshire and in South Wales and estimated about 65 tcf, or just over two years of UK demand. (Strictly the Welsh estimate is somewhat below this, as Wrexham is on the Welsh border and Cheshire is an English county. )

On 23rd May 2014 BGS published the results for the Midland Valley of Scotland. The central estimate for shale gas was 80.3 tcf (3 years of UK demand) and for shale oil 800 million tonnes (15 months of refinery production).

Most recently on 13th October 2016, BGS published the results for the Jurassic shale of the Wessex area. Central estimate for shale oil was 149 million tonnes, equivalent to three months of UK refinery production.

In all, conservatively there is estimated to be sufficient gas to supply the UK for over 54 years and oil for two and half years. The impact on supply, and therefore the impact on jobs and (in the case of gas) on energy prices, demands on the ability of businesses to profitability develop these resources. As has happened in the USA, the impact on jobs is mostly dependent on the impact on prices, as low prices affect other industries. In the USA, industries that are sensitive to energy prices (or use gas as a raw material) have returned from overseas, boosting jobs. FoE has played no small part in delaying planning applications with spurious arguments, along with generating false fears that could have made regulations more onerous than if an objective assessment of the risks had been made.

Fracking can’t help any short term or medium term energy crisis.

Even if the industry was able to move ahead as fast as it wants, we wouldn’t see significant production until about 2025.

This is actually true and up to date. If it were not for the Climate Change Act along with eco-activists blocking every move to meet the real energy demands in the most affordable and efficient way possible, there would be no prospective energy crisis. In terms of shale gas meeting energy demands (and gas-fired power stations being built) FoE should claim some of the credit for preventing the rapid develop of cheap and reliable energy sources, and thus exacerbating fuel poverty.

Scientists agree that to stop dangerous climate change, 80% of fossil fuels that we know about need to stay in the ground.

Setting up a whole new fossil fuel industry is going in completely the wrong direction, if the UK is to do its fair share to stop climate change.

The hypothesis is that global emissions lead to higher levels of greenhouse gases. In respect of CO2 this is clear. But the evidence that accelerating rate of rise in CO2 levels has led to accelerating average global temperatures is strongly contradicted by real world data. There is no scientific consensus that contracts this conclusion. Further there is no proper scientific evidence to suggest that climate is changing for the worse, if you look at the actual data, like leading climate scientist Dr John Christy does in this lecture. But even if the catastrophic global warming hypothesis were true (despite the weight of real world data against it) global warming is global. Britain is currently emitting about 1.1% of global emissions. Even with all the recently discovered shale gas and oil deposits, under the UK is probably less than 1% of all estimated fossil fuel deposits. Keeping the fossil fuels under British soil in the ground will do nothing to change the global emissions situation. Britain tried to lead the way with the Climate Change Act of 2008, in committing to reduce its emissions by 80% by 2050. The INDC submissions leading up to COP21 Paris in December 2015 clearly showed that the rest of the countries were collectively not following that lead. The UNFCCC produced a graph showing the difference of the vague policy proposals might make. I have stuck on the approximate emissions pathway to which the UK is committed.

The FoE is basically objecting to fracking to keep up the appearance that the UK is “doing its bit” to save the world from catastrophic global warming. But in the real world, global warming ain’t happening, neither are the predicted catastrophes. Even if it were, whatever Britain does will make no difference. FoE attempting to deny future jobs growth and stop the alleviation of fuel poverty to maintain the fantasy that Britain is leading the way on climate change.

Isn’t it better to have our own gas rather than importing it?

…….

If we went all out for shale, our gas imports would stay at current levels as the North Sea supply declines – and imports could increase by 11%.

This claim, without any reference, is based likely based on the same out of date sources as below. If FoE and fellow-travellers kept out of the way with their erroneous legal challenges and distortions then shale gas has a huge potential to cause imports to decline.

Indeed, one independent firm, Lux Research, projected last week that “estimated emissions would be 16 percent higher after two terms of Trump’s policies than they would be after two terms of Clinton’s, amounting to 3.4 billion tons greater emissions over the next eight years.”

There is a little graph to sort of back this up.

Whilst Romm then states two reasons why he does not think emissions will rise so much (Trump will cause a massive recession and will not win a second term) he then states the Twitter quote:-

That said, the damage and delay that even a one-term President Trump could do will make the already difficult task of keeping total warming well below 2°C essentially impossible.

So a difference of much less than 3.4 GtCO2e over eight years will make keeping total warming well below 2°C essentially impossible.
Before looking at the evidence that contradicts this, there are even more bizarre claims made by the expert climate scientists at RealClimate. They use a different graph which is probably a couple of years old and explain:-

Here are some numbers. Carbon emissions from the United States have been dropping since the year 2000, more than on-track to meet a target for the year 2020. Perhaps with continued effort and improving technology, emissions might have dropped to below the 2020 target by 2020, let’s say to 5 gigatons of CO2 per year (5000 megatons in the plot). In actuality, now, let’s say that removing restrictions on energy inefficiency and air pollution could potentially lead to US emissions by 2020 of about 7 gigatons of CO2. This assumes that future growth in emissions followed the faster growth rates from the 1990’s.
Maybe neither of these things will happen exactly, but these scenarios give us a high-end estimate for the difference between the two, which comes to about 4 gigatons of CO2 over four years. There will also probably be extra emissions beyond 2020 due to the lost opportunity to decarbonize and streamline the energy system between now and then. Call it 4-6 gigatons of Trump CO2.
This large quantity of gas can be put into the context of what it will take to avoid the peak warming threshold agreed to in Paris. In order to avoid exceeding a very disruptive warming of 1.5 °C with 66% probability, humanity can release approximately 220 gigatons of CO2 after January, 2017 (IPCC Climate Change 2014 Synthesis report, Table 2.2, corrected for emissions since 2011). The 4-6 Gtons of Trump CO2 will not by itself put the world over this threshold. But global CO2 emission rates are now about 36 gigatons of CO2 per year, giving a time horizon of only about six years of business-as-usual (!) before we cross the line, leaving basically no time for screwing around. To reach the catastrophic 2 °C, about 1000 gigatons of CO2 remain (about 20 years of business as usual). Note that these estimates were done before global temperatures spiked since 2014 — we are currently at 1.2 °C! So these temperature boundaries may be closer than was recently thought.

RealClimate come up with nearly twice the difference made by Joe Romm / Lux Research, but at least admit in the final paragraph that whoever won would not make much difference.
There are two parts to putting these analyses into context – the US context and the global one.
In the USA emissions have indeed been falling since 2000, this despite the population growing. The rate of decline has significantly increased in the years of the Obama Presidency, but for reasons quite separate from actions to reduce emissions. First there was the credit crunch, followed by the slowest recovery in US history. Second, the high oil price encouraged emissions reductions, along with the loss of energy-intensive industries to countries with lower energy costs. Third is that the shale gas revolution has meant switching from coal to gas in electricity production.
But the global context is even more important. RealClimate does acknowledge the global figure, but only mentions CO2 emissions. The 36GtCO2 is only two-thirds of total greenhouse gas emissions of about 55GTCO2e and that figure is rising by 1-2% a year. The graph – reproduced from the USA INDC submission to the UNFCCC – clearly states that it is in million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. What is more, these are vague policy proposals, that President Obama would have been unable to get through Congress. Further, most of the proposed emission reductions were through extrapolating trends that of what has been happening without any policy intervention.
If the 1.5°C limit breached from 220 GtCO2e of additional emissions, it will be breached in the run-up to Christmas 2020. The 1000 GtCO2e for the 2°C limit was from 2011. By simple arithmetic it is now below 800GtCO2e with about 15 years remaining if (a) a doubling of CO2 levels (or equivalent GHG gases) leads to 3°C of warming (b) the estimated quantity of emissions to a unit rise in atmospheric gas levels is correct and (b) the GHG gas emitted is retained for a very long period in the atmosphere.
Even simple arithmetic is not required. Prior to the Paris talks the UNFCCC combined all the INDCs – including that of the USA to cut emissions as shown in the graph above – were globally aggregated and compared to the approximate emissions pathways for 1.5°C and least-cost 2°C warming. The updated version, post-Paris is below.
The difference Donald Trump will make is somewhere in the thickness of the thick yellow line. There is no prospect of the aimed-for blue emissions pathways. No amount of ranting or protests at the President-elect Trump will change the insignificant difference the United States will make with any politically-acceptable and workable set of policies, nor can make in a country with less than a twentieth of the global population and less that one seventh of global emissions.

the Charities Commissioners have taken a dim view of an FoE leaflet that claimed that silica – that’s sand to you or me – used in fracking fluid was a known carcinogen.

Up pops a FoE activist making all sorts of comments, including attacking the hosts book The Hockey Stick Illusion. Below is my comment

Phil Clarke’s comments on the hosts book are an insight into the Green Activists.
He says Jan 30, 2016 at 9:58 AM

So you’ve read HSI, then?
I have a reading backlog of far more worthwhile volumes, fiction and non-fiction. Does anybody dispute a single point in Tamino’s adept demolition?

and

Where did I slag off HSI? I simply trust Tamino; the point about innuendo certainly rings true, based on other writings.
So no, I won’t be shelling out for a copy of a hatchet job on a quarter-century old study. But I did read this, in detailhttp://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v6/n5/full/ngeo1797.html

Tamino’s article was responded to twice by Steve McIntyre. The first looks at the use of non-standard statistical methods and Re-post of “Tamino and the Magic Flute” simply repeats the post of two years before. Tamino had ignored previous rebuttals. A simple illustration is the Gaspé series that Tamino defends. He misses out many issues with this key element in the reconstruction, including that a later sample from the area failed to show a hockey stick.
So Phil Clarke has attacked a book that he has not read, based on biased review by an author in line with his own prejudices. He ignores the counter-arguments, just as the biased review author does as well. Says a lot about the rubbish Cuadrilla are up against.

I believe Max Planck did have a point. In science people tenaciously hold onto ideas even if they have been falsified by the evidence or (as more often happens) they are supplanted by better ideas. Where the existing ideas form an institutionalized consensus, discrimination has occurred against those with the hypotheses can undermine that consensus. It can be that the new research paradigm can only gain prominence when the numbers dwindle in the old paradigm. As a result the advance of new knowledge and understanding is held back.

To combat this innate conservatism in ideas I propose four ideas.

First is to promote methods of evaluating competing theories that are independent of consensus or opinion. In pure science that is by conducting experiments that would falsify a hypothesis. In complex concepts, for which experiment is not possible and data is incomplete and of poor quality, like the AGW hypothesis or economic theories, comparative analysis needs to be applied based upon independent standards.

Second is to recognize institutional bias by promoting pluralism and innovation.

Third is to encourage better definition of concepts, more rigorous standards of data within the existing research paradigm to push the boundaries.

Fourth is to train people to separate scientific endeavours from belief systems, whether religious, political or ethical.

The problem for William Connolley is that all his efforts within climatology – such as editing Wikipedia to his narrow views, or helping set up Real Climate to save the Mannian Hockey Stick from exposure of its many flaws – are with enforcing the existing paradigm and blocking any challenges. He is part of the problem that Planck was talking about.

As an example of the narrow and dogmatic views that Connolley supports, here is the late Bob Carter on his major point about how beliefs in unprecedented human-caused warming are undermined by the long-term temperature proxies from ice core data. The video quality is poor, probably due to a lack of professional funding that Connolley and his fellow-travellers fought so hard to deny.

Yesterday, in the Greens and the Fascists, Bishop Hill commented on Jonah Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascists. In summing up, BH stated:-

Goldberg is keen to point out that the liberal and progressive left of today do not share the violent tendencies of their fascist forebears: theirs is a gentler totalitarianism (again in the original sense of the word). The same case can be made for the greens. At least for now; it is hard to avoid observing that their rhetoric is becoming steadily more violent and the calls for unmistakably fascist policy measures are ever more common.

The link is to an article in the Ecologist (reprinted from Open Democracy blog) – “Coal protesters must be Matt Ridley’s guilty consience”

The coal profits that fill Matt Ridley’s bank account come wet with the blood of those killed and displaced by the climate disaster his mines contribute to, writes T. If hgis consicence is no longer functioning, then others must step into that role to confront him with the evil that he is doing. (Spelling as in the original)

The protest consisted of blocking the road for eight hours to Shotton open cast coal mine. The reasoning was

This was an effective piece of direct action against a mine that is a major contributor to climate disaster, and a powerful statement against the climate-denying Times columnist, Viscount Matt Ridley, that owns the site. In his honour, we carried out the action as ‘Matt Ridley’s Conscience’.

The mine produces about one million tonnes of coal a year out of 8,000 million tonnes globally. The blocking may have reduced annual output by 0.3%. This will be made up from the mine, or from other sources. Coal is not the only source of greenhouse gas emissions, so the coal resulting in less than 0.004% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Further, the alleged impact of GHG emissions on the climate is cumulative. The recoverable coal at Shotton is estimated at 6 million tonnes or 0.0007% of the estimated global reserves of 861 billion tonnes (Page 5). These global reserves could increase as new deposits are found, as has happened in the recent past for coal, gas and oil. So far from being “a major contributor to climate disaster”, Shotton Open Cast Coal Mine is a drop in the ocean.

But is there a climate disaster of which Matt Ridley is in denial? Anonymous author and convicted criminal T does not offer any evidence of current climate disasters. He is not talking about modelled projections, but currently available evidence. So where are all the dead bodies, or the displaced persons? Where are the increased deaths through drought-caused famines? Where are the increased deaths from malaria or other diseases from warmer and worsening conditions? Where is the evidence of increased deaths from extreme weather, such as hurricanes? Where are the refugees from drought-stricken areas, or from low-lying areas now submerged beneath the waves?

The link leads to a script of the Radio 4 interview with annotated comments. I am not sure that all the collective brains do debunk (that is expose the falseness or hollowness of (an idea or belief)) Matt Ridley’s comments. Mostly it is based on nit-picking or pointing out the contradictions with their own views and values. There are two extreme examples among 75 comments I would like to highlight two.

First is that Matt Ridley mentioned the Hockey Stick graphs and the work of Steve McIntyre in exposing the underlying poor data. The lack of a medieval warm period would provide circumstantial (or indirect) evidence that the warming of the last 200 years is unprecedented. Gavin Schmidt, responded with comments (5) and (6) shown below.

Schmidt is fully aware that Steve McIntyre also examined the Wahl and Amman paper and thoroughly discredited it. In 2008 Andrew Montford wrote a long paper of the shenanigans that went into the publication of the paper, and its lack of statistical significance. Following from this Montford wrote the Hockey Stick Illusion in 2010, which was reviewed by Tamino of RealClimate. Steve McIntyre was able to refute the core arguments in Tamino’s polemic by reposting Tamino and the Magic Flute, which was written in 2008 and covered all the substantial arguments that Tamino made. Montford’s book further shows a number of instances where peer review in academic climatology journals is not a quality control mechanism, but more a device of discrimination between those that support the current research paradigm and those that would undermine that consensus.

Comment 6 concludes

The best updates since then – which include both methodology improvements and expanded data sources – do not show anything dramatically different to the basic picture shown in MBH.

The link is to Chapter 5 on the IPCC AR5 WG1 assessment report. The paleoclimate discussion is a small subsection, a distinct reversal from the prominent place given to the original hockey stick in the third assessment report of 2001. I would contend the picture is dramatically different. Compare the original hockey stick of the past 1,000 years with Figure 5.7 on page 409 of AR5 WG1 Chapter 5.

In 2001, the MBH reconstruction was clear. From 1900 to 2000 average temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere have risen by over 1C, far more than the change in any of century. But from at least two of the reconstructions – Ma08eivl and Lj10cps – there have been similarly sized fluctuations in other periods. The evidence now seems to back up Matt Ridley’s position of some human influence on temperatures, but does not support the contention of unprecedented temperature change. Gavin Schmidt’s opinions are not those of an expert witness, but of a blinkered activist.

Table 2 is a reproduction of World Health Organisation data from 2002. It clearly shows that global warming is well down the list of causes of deaths. Goklany states in the article why these figures are based on dubious assumptions. Anonymous T falsely believes that global warming is curr

Figure 6 for the period 1990-2010 shows

the Global Death and Death Rates per million Due to Extreme Weather Events

CO2 Emissions

Global average GDP Per Capita

Figure 6 provides strong empirical evidence that increasing CO2 emissions (about 70-80% of total GHG emissions) have not caused increased deaths. They are a consequence of increasing GDP per capita, which as Goklany argues, have resulted in fewer deaths from extreme weather. More importantly, increasing GDP has resulted in increased life expectancy and reductions in malnutrition and deaths that be averted by access to rudimentary health care. Anonymous T would not know this even if he had read all the comments, yet it completely undermines the beliefs that caused him to single out Matt Ridley.

The worst part of Anonymous T’s article

Anonymous T concludes the article as follows (Bold mine)

The legal process efficiently served its function of bureaucratising our struggle, making us attempt to justify our actions in terms of the state’s narrow, violent logic. The ethics of our action are so clear, and declaring myself guilty felt like folding to that.

We found ourselves depressed and demoralised, swamped in legal paperwork. Pleading guilty frees us from the stress of a court case, allowing us to focus on more effective arenas of struggle.

I faced this case from a position of relative privilege – with the sort of appearance, education and lawyers that the courts favour. Even then I found it crushing. Today my thoughts are with those who experience the racism, classism and ableism of the state and its laws in a way that I did not.

That reflection makes me even more convinced of the rightness of our actions. Climate violence strikes along imperialist lines, with those least responsible, those already most disadvantaged by colonial capitalism, feeling the worst impacts.

Those are the people that lead our struggle, but are often also the most vulnerable to repression in the struggle. When fighting alongside those who find themselves at many more intersections of the law’s oppression than I do, I have a responsibility to volunteer first when we need to face up to the police and the state.

Faced with structural injustice and laws that defend it, Matt Ridley’s Conscience had no choice but to disobey. Matt Ridley has no conscience and neither does the state nor its system of laws. Join in. Be the Conscience you want to see in the world.

The writer rejects the rule of law, and is determined to carry out more acts of defiance against it. He intends to commit more acts of violence, with “climate” as a cover for revolutionary Marxism. Further the writer is trying to incite others to follow his lead. He claims to know Matt Ridley’s Conscience better than Ridley himself, but in the next sentence claims that “Matt Ridley has no conscience“. Further this statement would seem to contradict a justification for the criminal acts allegedly made in Bedlington Magistrates Court on December 16ththat the protesters were frustrated by the lack of UK Government action to combat climate change.

It is not clear who is the author of this article, but he/she is one of the following:-

The following is a comment to be posted at Bishop Hill, responding to another attempt by blogger ….andThenThere’sPhysics to undermine the work of Bjorn Lomborg. The previous attempt was discussed here. This post includes a number of links, as well as a couple of illustrative screen captures at the foot of the table.

aTTP’s comment is

In fact, you should read Joe Romm’s post about this. He’s showing that the INDCs are likely to lead to around 3.5C which I think is relative to something like the 1860-1880 mean. This is very similar to the MIT’s 3.7, and quite a bit lower than the RCP8.5 of around 4.5C. So, yes, we all know that the INDCs are not going to do as much as some might like, but the impact is likely to be a good deal greater than that implied by Lomborg who has essentially assumed that we get to 2030 and then simply give up.

Nov 11, 2015 at 9:31 AM | …and Then There’s Physics

My Comment

aTTP at 9.31 refers to Joe Romm’s blog post of Nov 3 “Misleading U.N. Report Confuses Media On Paris Climate Talks“. Romm uses Climate Interactive’s Climate Scoreboard Tool to show the INDC submissions (if fully implemented) will result in 3.5°C as against the 4.5°C in the non-policy “No Action” Scenario. This is six times the claimed maximum impact of 0.17°C claimed in Lomberg’s new paper. Who is right? What struck me first was that Romm’s first graph, copied straight from the Climate Interactive’s seem to have a very large estimate for emissions in the “No Action” Scenario producing. Downloading the underlying data, I find the “No Action” global emissions in 2100 are 139.3 GtCO2e, compared with about 110 GtCO2e in Figure SPM5(a) of the AR5 Synthesis Report for the RCP8.5 scenario high emissions scenario. But it is the breakdown per country or region that matters.

For the USA, without action emissions are forecast to rise from 2010 to 2030 by 40%, in contrast to a rise of just 9% in the period 1990 to 2010. It is likely that emissions will fall without policy and will be no higher in 2100 than in 2010. The “no action” scenario overestimates 2030 emissions by 2-3 GtCO2e in 2030 and about 7-8 GtCO2e in 2100.

For the China the overestimation is even greater. Emissions will peak during the next decade as China fully industrializes, just as emissions peaked in most European countries in the 1970s and 1980s. Climate Interactive assumes that emissions will peak at 43 GtCO2e in 2090, whereas other estimates that the emissions peak will be around 16-17 GtCO2e before 2030.

Together, overestimations of the US and China’s “No Action” scenarios account for over half 55-60 GtCO2e 2100 emissions difference between the “No Action” and “Current INDC” scenarios. A very old IT term applies here – GIGO. If aTTP had actually checked the underlying assumptions he would realise that Romm’s rebuttal of Lomborg based on China’s emission assumptions (and repeated on his own blog) are as false as claiming that the availability of free condoms is why population peaks.

The blog andthentheresphysics is a particularly dogmatic and extremist website. Most of the time it provides extremely partisan opinion pieces on climate science, but last week the anonymous blogger had a post “Puerto Casado” concerning an article in the Telegraph about Paraguayan temperature by Christopher Booker. I posted the following comment

The post only looks at one station in isolation, and does not reference original source of the claims.

Paul Homewood at notalotofpeopleknowthat looked at all three available rural stations in Paraguay. The data from Mariscal and San Jan Buatista/Misiones had the same pattern of homogenization adjustments as Puerto Casado. That is, cooling of the past, so that instead of the raw data showing the 1960s being warmer than today, it was cooler.

Using his accountancy mind set, Homewood then (after Booker’s article was published) checked the six available urban sites in Paraguay. His conclusion was that

“warming adjustments have taken place at every single, currently operational site in Paraguay.”

Then he looked at all 14 available stations in neighbouring Bolivia. His conclusion

“At every station, bar one, we find the ….. past is cooled and the present warmed.”

(The exception was La Paz, where the cooling trend in the raw data had been reduced.)

Homogenization of data means correcting for biases. For a 580,000 sq mile area of Central South America it would appears strong adjustment biases to have been introduced in a single direction.

Homewood references every single site. Anyone can easily debunk my summary by searching the following:-

My comment did not contain the hyperlinks or italics. It has been deleted without passing through moderation. The only bit of the moderation policy I believe that I fall foul of is the last.

This blog is also turning out to be both more time consuming and more stressful than anticipated. Some moderation may be based purely on whether or not I/we can face dealing with how a particular comment thread is evolving. This is not a public service and so, in general, any moderation decision is final.

The counter-argument from ATTP is

If you look again at the information for this station the trend before adjustments was -1.37oC per century, after quality control it was -0.89 oC per century, and after adjusting for the station moves was +1.36 oC per century. Also, if you consider the same region for the same months, the trend is +1.37 oC per century, and for the country for the same months it is +1.28 oC per century. So, not only can one justify the adjustments, the result of the adjustments is consistent with what would be expected for that region and for the country.

Paul Homewood has investigated all the other stations in Paraguay or in neighbouring Bolivia and found similar ad hoc adjustments. It completely undermines ATTP’s arguments. This anonymous individual is wrong. Rather than face dealing that he is wrong, ATTP has deleted my comment. He is entitled to his beliefs, and in a free society can proselytize to his heart’s content. But there are boundaries. One of them is in suppressing evidence that undermines the justification for costly and harmful public policies. That is policies that are harming the poor here in Britain, but (and more importantly) can only be remotely successful by destroying the prospect of increasing living standards for over half the world’s population. Paul Homewood and others are increasingly uncovering similar biases in the temperature record in other parts of the world. The underlying data for the global surface temperature sets is in need of a proper, independent audit, to determine the extent of the biases within it. But when the accusation that the Paraguayan temperature data set is corrupted, people will point to ATTP’s blog post as evidence that there is but a single instance, and that instance has been debunked. Another boundary is a value that that many in the criminal justice system also hold dear. The more emotive the subject, the greater all concerned must go out of their way to compare and contrast the arguments. That way, the influence of our very human prejudices will be minimized. Again, independent audits will help eliminate this. If ATTP thinks he has all the answers then he will not be afraid to encourage people to look at both sides, evaluate by independent standards, and make up their own minds.

You have deleted two of my comments in the last 24 hours that meet all of your moderation criteria except one – that you cannot face dealing with a challenge. That is your prerogative. However, the first comment, (now posted on my blog) I believe completely undermines your argument. Paul Homewood has shown that the Puerto Casado dataset homogenization did not make it consistent with neighbouring non-homogenized surface temperature stations, but that all the Paraguayan and neighbouring Bolivian surface temperature stations were “homogenized” in the same way. That is, rather than eliminating the biases that local factors can create, the homogenizations, by people far removed from the local situations, effectively corrupted the data set, in a way that fits reality to the data.

I might be wrong in this. But based on your arguments so far I believe that my analysis is better than yours. I also believe that who has the better argument will only be resolved by an independent audit of the adjustments. If you are on the side of truth you would welcome that, just as a prosecutor would welcome the chance to prove their case in court, or a pharmaceutical company would welcome independent testing of their new wonder-drug that could save millions of lives. Even if I am wrong, I will be glad at being refuted by superior arguments, as I will know that to refute my claims will require you to up your game. Humanity will be served by my challenging a weak case and making it stronger. You have generated over 500 comments to your post, so an appeal for help via email should generate some response. If that does not work there are many well-funded organisations that I am sure will rush to your assistance.

There are at least seven options I think you can take.

Ignore me, and pretend nothing has happened. Bad idea. I will start analysing your posts, as you did with Wattsupwiththat, only rather than your pea-shooters firing blanks, I have the heavy artillery with HE shells.

Do an attack post – like desmogblog or Bob Ward of the Grantham Institute might do. Bad idea, I will take that as perverting or suppressing the evidence, and things will get rather rough. After all, I am but a (slightly) manic ex-beancounter, and you have the consensus of science on your side, so why is should sending in the PR thugs be necessary unless you are on the losing side?

Get together a response that genuinely ups the game. Win or lose you will have served humanity as I and others will have to rebut you. Engage and all will gain through greater understanding.

Admit that there are other valid points of view. A start would be to release this comment, which will get posted on my blog anyway. I quite accept that you cannot come up with a rebuttal at the drop-of-a-hat. A simple comment that a response will be made sometime this year is fine by me.

Also call for a truly independent audit of the surface temperature set. It could be for your own reasons, and if truly independent, I will support it. If a whitewash, like the enquiries that Gordon Brown ordered into Climategate, an audit will do more harm than good.

Close down your blog and do something else instead. You choose to be anonymous, and I respect that. Walking away is easy.

Admit that you got this one wrong. You will take some flack, but not from me.